24 Jun 2016

Enabling Dell E6410 "DualPoint Stick" scrolling in Debian 'Jessie'

Just a quick tip, because I found this information absurdly hard to
find online using the search terms I was using. If anyone else out
there has a Dell Latitude E6410 laptop, and wants to use it under
Linux and achieve the same scrolling behavior as under Windows, using
the big center button under the ‘DualPoint Stick’ (Dell’s term for the
Touchpoint-ish control in the middle of the keyboard) to scroll,
here’s what you need to do:

Create a new file in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/; I called it
60-wheel-emulation.conf, although the filename isn’t especially
important as long as it doesn’t start with a number lower than the
other files in the directory.

This activates a feature called (as you may have figured out) Wheel
Emulation, which simulates scroll wheel behavior when a button is
pressed and the mouse – or in this case, the pointing stick –
is moved. In Windows, this is the default behavior for the Dell
DualPoint, but in Linux, the default behavior is for that button to
behave as an (absurdly large) traditional middle-click mouse button,
which pastes the clipboard.

On a regular mouse, the Linux behavior (paste) is arguably a lot more
useful, particularly if you also have an actual scrollwheel. But on
the E6410, with the pointing stick, I think that scrolling is a lot
more common of an interaction than paste, and I found that I really
missed it.

This restores the functionality to what you may be used to.

Further information can be found at this Unix Stackexchange
question
which is where I got the original tip. Note that you can’t just copy
and paste from that page and have it work on a Dell; the product name
is wrong. You can determine the product name as described there,
using the xinput --list command, however, if you have another model
or brand of laptop.